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Clash Royale League (CRL) 2021 Rules - Visualized
We’ve transformed the CRL 2021 rules into easy-to-understand diagrams.
Clash Royale League (CRL) 2021 has already started! The rules for this year are drastically different than the previous years. Are you struggling to understand the rules? We have visualized the rulebook into these diagrams so that you can understand them better.
Stages
There are 8 monthly rounds for the entire year, with each month broken down into multiple stages.
Stage 1: Trophy Race (Ladder)
To qualify for the CRL Monthly Qualifier, players must compete on Ladder and reach the Top 1000 global leaderboard at the end of the season.
Stage 2: Monthly Qualifier: Day 1 Swiss (Top 1000)
After Supercell performs Fair Play checks and identifies players with duplicate accounts, players are invited to join the Monthly Qualifier.
Day 1 of the monthly qualifier is the Swiss round, where players will be split into 4 groups of 250 players max, designed to meet the time zone requirements for all the players.
Players will be seeded into a Swiss-system tournament (Wikipedia) consisting of 11 rounds. The winners are decided by the total win counts. In case of ties, winners are decided by these tiebreakers:
- Opponents’ Match Win Percentage, aka Opponent Win Rate (OWR)
- Players’ Game Win Percentage
- Players’ Opponents’ Opponents’ Match Win Percentage
During the first day of the event, players with 9 wins or more had all qualified. Players with 7 wins or less did not. Players with 8 wins and 3 losses were the ones whose fate were decided by the tiebreakers.
The Opponent Win Rate (OWR) tiebreaker can be difficult to understand, and we plan on writing a separate blog post about it. In brief, it is the most commonly used tiebreaker in Swiss system and is designed to determine the difficulty of your matches by evaluating the strength of your opponents — having played against better players means that your wins are more valuable.
All rounds are played in Duel format. Similar to Clan Wars 2 Duel mode, players will play a Best-of-3 (BO3) matches where none of the cards in their decks can repeat.
The top 8 players from each of the 4 groups in the Swiss round move on to the next stage and become Top 32.
Stage 3: Monthly Qualifier: Day 2: Double Round Robin (Top 32)
The top 32 players are split into 8 groups of 4, where they will play two rounds of Round Robin (Wikipedia). RR is a system where every player plays against everyone else. Double RR means that every player will play against other players twice. As there are 4 players in each group, every player will play 6 RR rounds total, where each RR round is composed of a duel match (BO3).
The best player in each of the 8 groups moves on to the next stage and these 8 players become Top 8.
Stage 4: Monthly Final: Double Elimination Bracket (Top 8)
The top 8 players are seeded into a Double-Elimination Bracket (Wikipedia). This is a bracket format where players will leave the tournament once they have lost 2 matches — or alternatively, you can think of it as the bracket format where you have one extra life — you can still become first in the tournament even if you lose one round.
The final placement in this bracket will determine your ultimate placement (rank) and prize.
Prize Pool
Monthly Rounds have these prizes (in USD):
| Rank | Prize |
|---|---|
| 1 | 20000 |
| 2 | 10000 |
| 3 | 6000 |
| 4 | 4000 |
| 5-6 | 3000 |
| 7-8 | 2000 |
| 9-16 | 1500 |
| 17-32 | 1000 |
Competitive Leaderboard + World Finals
The CRL 2021 system is quite innovative. Although every month is an event on its own with its own prize pool, the points system makes every battle matter as they all contribute to a player’s eventual placement on the Competitive Leaderboard — which will be used as the sole decider to the World Finals.
Players earn points in all stages throughout the season. The points they earn are added together and will determine their rank on the Competitive Leaderboard. At the conclusion of the 8th Round, the top 24 players who have the most amount of points will receive an invitation to the World Finals.
The 8 remaining spots will be opened to players from 25th - 56th place (32 total players) on the Competitive Leaderboard during the Last Chance Qualifier. LCQ will be played as a Single Elimination Bracket (Wikipedia). The top 8 players in this event will earn a place to compete at the World Finals.
CRL Points + How to earn them
Points can be earned in every stage in the monthly event. Every single point matters. If your goal is to eventually get to the World Finals, fight for every battle in the monthly events even if it doesn’t look like that you will get into the later stages that month. Every win and thus every point you earn gets you one step closer to qualify for the World Finals.
Here’s how the points are calculated in the different events and stages:
Trophy Race (Ladder)
| Rank | Points |
|---|---|
| Top 10 | 40 |
| Top 50 | 25 |
| Top 100 | 20 |
| Top 500 | 5 |
| Top 1000 | 1 |
Monthly Qualifier: Day 1: Swiss
- 1 Win = 5 Points
- A win is defined as a match-win in a BO3 Duel.
- Swiss has 11 rounds, so players can earn up to 55 points.
Monthly Qualifier: Day 2: Double Round Robin
- 1 Win = 5 Points
- Double RR has 6 rounds, so players can earn up to 30 points.
Monthly Final: Double Elimination Bracket
- Players will earn points based on their placement
| Rank | Points |
|---|---|
| 1 | 100 |
| 2 | 70 |
| 3-4 | 50 |
| 5-8 | 35 |
Prizes
The total prize pool for the entire year is 1,644,000 USD, with the top prize being 200,000 USD! The magnitude of the first prize is not apparent until we visualize it in the chart above — just look at how much more it is compared to the top prize of the Monthly events!
Monthly Rounds: 78,000 per month - 624,000 total for all 8 rounds
| Rank | Prize |
|---|---|
| 1 | 20000 |
| 2 | 10000 |
| 3 | 6000 |
| 4 | 4000 |
| 5-6 | 3000 |
| 7-8 | 2000 |
| 9-16 | 1500 |
| 17-32 | 1000 |
| Total | 78000 |
Last Chance Qualifier (LCQ) earns player a place in the World Finals and does not have a prize pool.
World Finals: 1,020,000
| Rank | Prize |
|---|---|
| 1 | 200000 |
| 2 | 100000 |
| 3-4 | 70000 |
| 5-8 | 35000 |
| 9-16 | 25000 |
| 17-32 | 15000 |
| Total | 1020000 |
Resources
- Check out our live CRL 2021 Leaderboard to see how your favorite player is performing!
- Read the CRL 2021 News for the latest scores
- Follow @RoyaleAPI_News to get notified about all the important things about CRL
- Follow @RoyaleAPI to be aware of all the CRL resources that we offer
Feedback
Tell us on RoyaleAPI Discuss if there’s anything you’d like to know about CRL.
In our next post, we will talk a little bit about the Swiss tournament system and the strategies involved in getting high placements. Stay tuned.
Content and visualizations for this post are based on the CRL 2021 Rule Book version 5.0b posted on the official Clash Royale League site.
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